Hence the systemic violence of Mafia life. Violence, in The Godfather films, is never engaged in for the h e l l of it, or for random kicks; the point is that since the government police and courts will not enforce contracts they deem to be illegal, debts incurred in the Mafia world have to be enforced by violence, by the secular arm. But the violence simply enforces the Mafia equivalent of the law: the codes of honor and loyalty without which the whole enterprise would simply be random and pointless violence. [...]

.*., I'm kinda baffled as to why you wanted to explain to us that Mafia doesn't kill people for the hell of it?

It's pretty much common knowledge that Mafia is in the "business of killing" and no one doubts it. And there's nothing good about it, yanno.

That surely doesn't mean you can try to @ # ! * with Mafia for the hell of it, thou!

Actually the state should pay for sexually active women to revert to virginity (or at least pay for an operation that will allow them to give the impression that they are virgins). France does, even though France is such a militantly secular nation that hijabs are banned in school, and even though the only women interested in "hymenoplasty," as the procedure is known, are Muslims for whose intended husbands their non-virginity will be a deal-breaker. Dr. Bernard Paniel is an obstetrician-gynecologist for France's public health system, and over many years has become the go-to guy for Muslim women who need to be "mended" before their wedding night, or face the wrath of their shamed, traditionally-minded grooms and the probable annulment of their marriage. Dr. Paniel "mends" about 30 broken hymens a year with a simple procedure that can be performed with a local anesthetic. He considers himself the "oil in the machine" that allows tradition to carry on, and is teaching the procedure, which he learned as a visiting doctor in a Tunisian hospital in the 1960s, to his younger colleagues. Dr. Paniel doesn't issue "virginity certificates" as some of his colleagues do, but perhaps just as controversially -- and resulting in the same effect -- he does provide his patients with vials of blood to produce on their wedding night. It is an understatement to observe that such (in our culture) medieval-era proofs of virginity -- blood on the wedding night sheets displayed to witnesses -- is utterly outmoded, a relic of pre-enlightened times in Judaism and Christianity. But the continuing, and consequential fixation with virginity amongst observant Muslim men is a reality, and the practice of hymenoplasty has now become a legal and political hot chestnut in France.

For in April a court in the northern French city of Lille annulled a marriage between a convert to Islam and a French woman of North African provenance on the grounds that her husband had discovered on their wedding night that she was not a virgin. It is expected that the ruling will encourage Muslim men with retrograde views of women's obligations to believe the state supports their perspective. This will escalate demands for premarital virginity inspections, which in turn will up the demand for hymenoplasties. The verdict was only made public two weeks ago, and it is causing a ferment of denunciation. Last week 150 members of the European Parliament denounced the ruling as an act of "serious regression." Those who stand to lose the most from the ruling are modern Muslim women. The Muslim women's rights group "Ni putes ni Soumises" (neither prostitutes nor submissive) claim surgeons performing the intervention have overstepped their professional bounds. Illustrating this well-taken point, gynecologist Jacques Milliez, head of the ethics committee of the London-based International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, admits that he routinely issues certificates attesting to the "virginity" of his patients, and says many other colleagues do as well, whether the women are sexually active or not. Sihem Habchi, the group's president, asks: "Does it really help? Doesn't it just bolster this tradition and this hypocrisy?" Dr. Milliez justifies his actions on the grounds that he is saving women from being ostracized by their communities. Nevertheless he is worried about the effects of the ruling and is organizing a "summit" around the procedure's ethics to be held in October.

Take it for what it's worth but I know a young woman who'd do it from behind so that she'd remain a virgin; she married her husband when she was 33.

We all know that, "as is" today, the kind of behavior that you mention, would naturally not be tolerated the society - and I would not expect even the most arduous gay activist to think he can be a pig out there in public (even in the name of some "revolution") and not dealt appropriately by the authorities!

Hence the systemic violence of Mafia life. Violence, in The Godfather films, is never engaged in for the h e l l of it, or for random kicks; the point is that since the government police and courts will not enforce contracts they deem to be illegal, debts incurred in the Mafia world have to be enforced by violence, by the secular arm. But the violence simply enforces the Mafia equivalent of the law: the codes of honor and loyalty without which the whole enterprise would simply be random and pointless violence. [...]

.*., I'm kinda baffled as to why you wanted to explain to us that Mafia doesn't kill people for the hell of it?

It's pretty much common knowledge that Mafia is in the "business of killing" and no one doubts it. And there's nothing good about it, yanno.

That surely doesn't mean you can try to @ # ! * with Mafia for the hell of it, thou!

end-in-itself, just do not push it any further, the more you do it (try to make people aware of the violence perpetrated by an organization such as the Mafia), the more they will make comments like the ones you commented on.

Moreover, even the masculine gay man "reduces himself" to the status of a woman in his readiness to fall in love with his peers among his fellow men — and it is important, moreover, to recognize that he is ready to fall totally in love; ready to seek out a total, and especially physical, expression and communication of attraction and desire; and ready to make himself dependent upon and vulnerable to the other, an extremely "un-masculine" position, and an extremely difficult and precarious position for anyone who is produced to be a "man" in a patriarchal sexist and heterosexist culture.

Masculine men (especially those who go with women too) have a much easier time at fooling people they're gay, though!

The gender system we have instituted in our society dominated by the sexist culture involves the domination of men over women and institutionalized heterosexuality. It is by means of the abolition of this gender system and class that human beings really can change, really overcome the competition and struggle to dominate, the survival of the fittest, that reactionaries have always proclaimed is an eternal part of the human condition. Love is to be seen as a relationship between equals, rather than between dominant and subordinate.

What happens is that the biological category of "sex" gets transformed into the cultural category of "gender." The creation of "gender" is the construction of social identities of "man" and "woman" based upon a supposed parallel with the biological sex differences of "male" and "female," and this construction always operates to create a rigid binary division of these social identities and a hierarchically unequal relation between those assigned to the dominant, masculine position and those assigned to the subordinate, feminine position. Gender is socially constructed and not naturally predetermined. In fact, the new human being will be of a kind that would seem to us as intrinsically both masculine and feminine, as both a man and a woman, and because of this, really neither masculine nor feminine, neither man or woman, but instead something new, something of a character that will have superseded the usefulness and meaningfulness of such divisions and demarcations. Not only would this future human being seem to be what we would describe as "bisexual," but also this new human being would likely seem to us to be far more gay than straight (especially in the way this new human being engages in relations of intimacy and affection, friendship and love).

I'd like to add that, as things are, nowadays it is gay people that are engaged in the freest and most equal relationships. They are already outside of the family and they have already, at least in part, rejected the "masculine" and "feminine" roles that society has designed for them. For straight men and women it is impossible to escape their rigid gender roles and those of oppressor and oppressed. Gay men and lesbian women don't need to oppress women in order to fulfill their own psychosexual needs, and lesbian women don't have to relate sexuality to the male oppressor. Homosexuality, love between people who are alike, is decisively distinct from heterosexuality in its structural feature that two people who are lovers of a third can themselves also, in principle, be lovers. Such provides an absolute precondition if rivalry and hate are to be ended.

I do believe gay men have a great deal to teach straight men about initiation and mourning the loss of power in the culture. Gay community is the story of what men gain by sacrificing the power conferred by gender when they come out of the closet. This is the pivotal real-life experience of every out gay man -- a usually terrifying sacrifice of conventional values and power. It is this that threatens most straight men (and the institutions they control), although it usually gets expressed simplistically in statements about envy or contempt of the gay people's sexual freedoms. The so-called straight man says he has no model for going "beyond the hero" and the conventional male warrior, forgetting or repressing the model right under his nose, represented for him in the gay community -- the man who has renounced, by whatever process and for various reasons, the "patriarchal dividend," i.e., the payoff for being part of the patriarchy. Straight men have much to learn from their homosexual counterparts about handling, containing, and transforming the pain that results from their "falling out" of unconscious identity with the patriarchy.

The breaking down of divisions between gay and straight is not going to happen by gay and straight meeting half-way. Because straight, by definition, is consonant with the gender system, the ground on which gays shall gradually converge with their straight brothers is on their side of the fence. If straights are serious about undermining masculinity, then they must accept the fact of their own deviance as defined by the existing order, and as long as they resist the idea and the reality of homosexuality, we can only see this as a deep-seated allegiance to the masculine gender that belies their professions of anti-sexism. Gays for their part refuse to accept that they are permanently set apart as the minority. This is a static view of the situation - viewed dynamically, they are the thin end of a wedge. Gayness is the wedge that splits open the gender system, in which feminine and masculine men fit together in the sexual division of labor: a double wedge in fact, as the rejection of heterosexuality and all it implies proceeds in parallel among both women and men. As more and more people follow gay people's lead and the gender system crumbles, they shall have to redefine themselves, no longer as a deviant minority but as the new majority, having only pity for the stubborn minority who still cling for a while to the traditional path.

Even when straight men are allied by common work, kinship or belief, they are still underneath it all enemy brothers; it is legendary how competition over women turns brotherhood into hate. Even when not immediately realized, this potential always lurks just beneath the surface, dividing men from one another and thus helping perpetuate the law of violence -- indeed it is the first precondition for masculine hierarchy. If men are to love one another, it must be possible for them to love one another in the full, sexual sense; as long as this is tabooed, inter-male competition can never be dissolved. What perpetuates this vicious competition, of course, is not the practice of heterosexuality, but the non-practice of homosexuality. It would disappear if the gender system were abolished, and human beings could relate to one another irrespective of biological sex, i.e., both homo and heterosexually, with the family accordingly replaced by a form of commune. But in this case, the resultant 'bisexuality' would be clearly established on the terms of homosexuality, or rather gayness. It would be a sexuality between essentially similar individuals, rather than essentially dissimilar, thus 'homosexual' rather than 'heterosexual.'

I'd like to add that, as things are, nowadays it is gay people that are engaged in the freest and most equal relationships. They are already outside of the family and they have already, at least in part, rejected the "masculine" and "feminine" roles that society has designed for them. For straight men and women it is impossible to escape their rigid gender roles and those of oppressor and oppressed. Gay men and lesbian women don't need to oppress women in order to fulfill their own psychosexual needs, and lesbian women don't have to relate sexuality to the male oppressor. Homosexuality, love between people who are alike, is decisively distinct from heterosexuality in its structural feature that two people who are lovers of a third can themselves also, in principle, be lovers. Such provides an absolute precondition if rivalry and hate are to be ended.

I do believe gay men have a great deal to teach straight men about initiation and mourning the loss of power in the culture. Gay community is the story of what men gain by sacrificing the power conferred by gender when they come out of the closet. This is the pivotal real-life experience of every out gay man -- a usually terrifying sacrifice of conventional values and power. It is this that threatens most straight men (and the institutions they control), although it usually gets expressed simplistically in statements about envy or contempt of the gay people's sexual freedoms. The so-called straight man says he has no model for going "beyond the hero" and the conventional male warrior, forgetting or repressing the model right under his nose, represented for him in the gay community -- the man who has renounced, by whatever process and for various reasons, the "patriarchal dividend," i.e., the payoff for being part of the patriarchy. Straight men have much to learn from their homosexual counterparts about handling, containing, and transforming the pain that results from their "falling out" of unconscious identity with the patriarchy.

The breaking down of divisions between gay and straight is not going to happen by gay and straight meeting half-way. Because straight, by definition, is consonant with the gender system, the ground on which gays shall gradually converge with their straight brothers is on their side of the fence. If straights are serious about undermining masculinity, then they must accept the fact of their own deviance as defined by the existing order, and as long as they resist the idea and the reality of homosexuality, we can only see this as a deep-seated allegiance to the masculine gender that belies their professions of anti-sexism. Gays for their part refuse to accept that they are permanently set apart as the minority. This is a static view of the situation - viewed dynamically, they are the thin end of a wedge. Gayness is the wedge that splits open the gender system, in which feminine and masculine men fit together in the sexual division of labor: a double wedge in fact, as the rejection of heterosexuality and all it implies proceeds in parallel among both women and men. As more and more people follow gay people's lead and the gender system crumbles, they shall have to redefine themselves, no longer as a deviant minority but as the new majority, having only pity for the stubborn minority who still cling for a while to the traditional path.

Even when straight men are allied by common work, kinship or belief, they are still underneath it all enemy brothers; it is legendary how competition over women turns brotherhood into hate. Even when not immediately realized, this potential always lurks just beneath the surface, dividing men from one another and thus helping perpetuate the law of violence -- indeed it is the first precondition for masculine hierarchy. If men are to love one another, it must be possible for them to love one another in the full, sexual sense; as long as this is tabooed, inter-male competition can never be dissolved. What perpetuates this vicious competition, of course, is not the practice of heterosexuality, but the non-practice of homosexuality. It would disappear if the gender system were abolished, and human beings could relate to one another irrespective of biological sex, i.e., both homo and heterosexually, with the family accordingly replaced by a form of commune. But in this case, the resultant 'bisexuality' would be clearly established on the terms of homosexuality, or rather gayness. It would be a sexuality between essentially similar individuals, rather than essentially dissimilar, thus 'homosexual' rather than 'heterosexual.'

Thinking about being gay in such a way means to make a job out of it.

What exactly do you mean flashplayer? That thinking about being gay as having some kind of "mission" in life causes you so much trouble that you feel just like you're having a full-time job - one for which you're not being paid though? I'd assume this is the deduction one would normally make, although I'm sure someone out there could make the exact opposite argument starting from exactly the same premises..